Elaine Lau

Contact Information

Academic Background

AD (Glenn Gould), M.Mus. (Cincinnati), B.Mus.(McMaster)

Biography

Versatile
as both a soloist and collaborative artist, Toronto-based pianist Elaine Lau
has performed as keyboardist and soloist with numerous orchestras, and
broadcast on CBC Radio 2, National Public Radio (US) and Rondo Classic
(Finland). She has performed with the Canadian Chamber Ensemble, Contact
Contemporary Music, and frequently with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony.
Equally at home with the standard canon, Elaine also has an avid interest in
the contemporary repertoire for toy, solo and duo piano, and is active in the
premiering of new works for these mediums. She has worked with many
composers, including George Crumb, Jack Behrens, Linda Catlin Smith and WL
Altman. Elaine has also been a featured solo recitalist with such
presenters as the Canadian Opera Company’s Piano Virtuoso concert series, Arts
and Letters Series, and at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg,
Ontario. Her live performances of Canadian piano repertoire can be found
online at the Canadian Music Centre.

As
duo pianist with Joseph Ferretti, Elaine has performed across Canada and the
US, including concerts at the Banff Centre, the Royal Conservatory of
Music, Blue Lake Fine Arts Festival and as concerto soloists on the NUMUS
Series. The duo has premiered many works, recorded for Capstone Records
and in 2006, held an artist residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts.
Along with Stephanie Chua, Elaine and Joseph also co-founded junctQín, a
keyboard collective of three devoted to performing new music. The group have
commissioned and collaborated with many composers with the assistance of
numerous foundations and grants, and was recently featured in a weeklong
broadcast in Finland, Armenia, Hungary and Kyrgyzstan.

Elaine
was coach and repetiteur for the Opera Theatre of Lucca (Italy) and from
2005-2008, collaborative pianist/instructor for the Pennsylvania Governor’s
School for the Arts (USA). In addition to performing, Elaine is active
nationally as an adjudicator and Senior Examiner for the Royal Conservatory of
Music. She also serves as a Teacher Advisor for the iSCORE Project, a
multi-institutional web-based learning tool project (Royal Conservatory,
Queen’s University, and Concordia University). A member of the piano faculty at Wilfrid
Laurier University since 2003, she also served as keyboard faculty at the
National Youth Orchestra of Canada for the summer of 2013.